High Court · Sedley J
Facts
Mr and Mrs Balchin owned a house in Norfolk whose value was seriously affected by a proposed road scheme promoted by the county council as highway authority, which required orders confirmed by the Department of Transport. The property was not one the council was obliged to acquire, but the council had discretionary statutory powers to purchase property blighted by highway schemes. The Balchins complained to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Administration that the Department had been guilty of maladministration in its handling of the scheme. The Commissioner investigated and concluded that there had been no maladministration by the Department. The Balchins sought judicial review of that conclusion.
Issue
Whether the decision of the Parliamentary Commissioner was open to judicial review, and if so whether he had erred by failing to take into account a relevant consideration, namely whether the Department ought to have drawn the attention of the council to its discretionary powers to acquire blighted property when confirming the scheme.
Held
Application granted. The decision of the Commissioner was quashed.
Ratio
- A finding of the Parliamentary Commissioner that there was no maladministration is reviewable on ordinary public law grounds, and will be quashed where the Commissioner fails to consider a matter which was so obviously material to the complaint that no reasonable Commissioner could have left it out of account.
- Where the complaint concerned the conduct of the Department in relation to a scheme causing blight, whether the Department should have alerted the highway authority to its powers to mitigate that blight was such a matter, and the Commissioner was not excused from considering it merely because the conduct of the local authority itself lay outside his jurisdiction.
The judgments
Sedley J (lead)
Accepted, following R v Parliamentary Commissioner for Administration, ex p Dyer [1994] 1 WLR 621, that the Commissioner has a broad discretion over the conduct and scope of his investigations and that the court will interfere only on recognised public law grounds. He held, however, that the Commissioner had failed to consider whether the Department, in dealing with the scheme, should have drawn the attention of the council to its discretionary powers to acquire or compensate for blighted property, which was a relevant consideration going to the heart of the complaint, and that the decision was therefore flawed.
Key reasoning
- The Commissioner is a statutory office holder exercising public functions, and nothing in the Parliamentary Commissioner Act 1967 excludes judicial review of his findings, although the breadth of his discretion means review is restrained.
- The complaint was in substance that the Department had allowed the scheme to proceed without regard to the hardship it would cause to the Balchins, so the question whether it should have pointed the council towards the means of relieving that hardship was central to whether there had been maladministration.
- The fact that the Commissioner could not investigate the council did not prevent him from considering whether the Department, within his jurisdiction, had failed in its own dealings with the council.
Where it fits in the module
On judicial review and the ombudsmen, Balchin is read with ex p Dyer to show the intensity of review the courts apply to the Parliamentary Commissioner: restrained respect for investigative discretion, combined with willingness to intervene where a material consideration is overlooked. It frames the debate about whether judicial review of ombudsmen is a necessary safeguard of legality or an intrusion into an alternative, more flexible form of accountability built around the concept of maladministration rather than legal error.
Criticisms
- Reviewing the reasoning of an ombudsman for failing to consider relevant matters risks judicialising a mechanism designed to be informal and different in kind from litigation.
- The concept of maladministration is open-textured and largely for the Commissioner, so it is debatable whether a court should decide what was obviously material to it.
- On the other hand, the case shows that without judicial review a complainant has no means of correcting an ombudsman who overlooks the substance of the complaint.
Written with AI (claude-opus-5.5 (Claude Code writer)) on 1 November 2026, reviewed for errors by a second model (claude-sonnet-5.5 (Claude Code checker)). Read the case itself at [1997] JPL 917. Spotted an error? Tell us.